Eurasian Natural Resources Corp’s account of 2012 was never going to make pretty reading. But few can have expected quite so many laughs from the FTSE 100 Kazakh miner.

The jokes began on the cover page, brazenly entitled: “Unlocking value”. Some boast for a group now being crawled over by the Serious Fraud Office, keen to discover how more than $100m (£64.5m) had allegedly been unlocked – and by whom.

Neither did the headline quite convey the rate at which value has been disappearing down the mineshaft. The shares have halved in a year. And on every major metric, the arrows have gone in the wrong direction. Revenues fell 18pc to $6.3bn, the previous year’s $1.99bn pre-tax profits were turned into $852m losses, net cash from operations dived 41pc to $1.27bn, net debt jumped 428pc to $5.14bn and the dividend got whacked by 76pc to just 6.5 cents.

“The primary focus for 2013 will be to maximise shareholder value through the implementation of our strategic priorities,” declared the chairman at the top of his statement, adding: “Since taking over as chairman, we have made considerable progress on the corporate governance front.”

Only that was from Mehmet Dalman, who quit last week frustrated that his efforts to clean up ENRC were being repeatedly thwarted by the executive team, led by chief executive Felix Vulis.

Straight after Mr Dalman’s signed two-page statement, ENRC has inserted a footnote. “On 23 April 2013 Mr Mehmet Dalman resigned from the board and Mr Gerhard Ammann was appointed Acting Chairman. His biography is on page 60.”

It is Mr Ammann, who ostensibly has to deal with the attempt by ENRC’s three co-founders - Alexander Mahkevitch, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, who together control 44pc of the shares – to take the £3.5bn company private.

While there is no mention of ENRC’s sacking of Dechert, the law firm that was investigating the alleged “fraud, bribery and corruption” relating to ENRC’s Kazakh and African operations, the report does have one further revelation.

It relates how the UK Listing Authority has asked ENRC to provide further details – under the rules governing the disclosure of related-party transactions – on the sale last May of Zhol Zhondeushi, a railway maintenance business. It was sold to Prime Residential County LLP, a business controlled by Arif Shadiev, the nephew of Mr Chodiev. It is alleged that soon after the business was sold, it won a maintenance contract worth $1bn.

To this, an ENRC spokesman would only say: “The sale of Zhol Zhondeushi was in line with ENRC’s strategy of disposing of the group’s unprofitable and non-core assets.”

Despite the disastrous year, Mr Vulis still pocketed £2.66m, including a £1.43m performance bonus – only a small reduction on the previous year’s £2.93m. ENRC also contributed £315,000 to his pension.

Curiously, Mr Vulis’s £178,000 of benefits in kind include “compensation for holidays not taken in Kazakhstan”.

An ENRC spokesman said Mr Vulis had a Kazakh contract and “under Kazakh employment law employees have to be paid for any holidays not taken”.

As Borat might say, it's a struggle to see how that might make benefit for ENRC’s gloriously broke minority shareholders.